Response to quotes from Chapter 13 from 'Storytelling for User Experience, Quesenbery & Brooks'
“We dialed the number, ready to tell them that the boss would be there if a little late. Really. The phone rang through to the receptionist.“Sorry,” she said. “He’s left for the day. With all this snow, he decided the safest thing to do was to leave his car in the city and take the train home early.”
Firstly, this quote points to a lack of consideration for safety, I think the larger point made here about perspective, is the importance of designing through holistic work behaviors. For example, a good holistic work environment would consider focusing on addressing the scenario in the quote by perhaps sending out a letter or call to the client to express their interest in the business partnership, while assessing the need to meet. The perspective of the client’s needs can be gathered accurately when the creating team of a design contributes equitably to the perspective of a design, which includes safety.
“As with character, the details you leave out are just as important as what you put in. While there are no hard and fast guidelines about what to leave out, consider leaving out noncritical details that might be fun for the audience to fill in for themselves.”
A way to establish character would be to consider what to depict and not through language forms. A metaphor I created for myself to better understand this approach was to think of written descriptions of a character as visual drawings. If it is vague— maybe it is a black and white silhouette. If it is detailed - explicit with age, city, ethnicity, social economic background, then this visual image reads with more specificity. And if it is detailed in depictions of behaviors and reactions, I may better sense the values of a character. It’s important to include what is relevant in the design and values within but perhaps leave out the rest.
“There are five aspects of context we’ll describe here. There are more, but these five are a good starting point. They are physical, emotional, sensory, historical, and memory.”
Context can be one of the more difficult elements of design to understand. Context is understood through the five aspects in the quote that possess their parameters as data. All five aspects are experienced differently from person to person— so an important part of a design consideration of context should engage with the diversity of physical, emotional, sensory, historical, and memory states.
For example, on a personal level– following this reading, I feel that I don’t consider the element of memory enough in my understanding of context. And, coincidentally, memory (particularly of a product user) is a relevant aspect when designing for interaction.